No Damsels. Equal Strength. Let Me Tell You How.

I have read approximately one thousand fantasy romances where the heroine's primary superpower is being the chosen one and being rescued.

I understand the appeal. I do. There's something deeply comforting about the idea that someone will swoop in and handle things. (Especially on the weeks when I can barely handle my inbox.) But as a reader, I noticed that the rescue narrative started to feel like a transaction. She's beautiful and in trouble. He's powerful and drawn to her. He saves her. She softens him. Credits roll.

And I kept asking: but what does she want? What does she know that he doesn't? What does she do when he's not in the room?

Those questions are how I write my characters now.

Here's the thing about power dynamics in romance and fantasy: they don't disappear when you write strong female characters. They shift. They become more interesting. Because real power—the kind that lives in a functional relationship or a compelling hero dynamic—isn't about dominance. It's about complementarity.

Two characters who are powerful in different ways, who need each other not because one is incomplete but because they're both better with the other in the room. That's tension. That's chemistry. That's a story I want to read at midnight when I should be sleeping.

My characters, specifically my BIPOC leads, do not wait for permission to be formidable.

That's a sentence I had to practice writing. Because genre fiction, even speculative fiction, has a long history of centering whiteness as default strength. The BIPOC character is often the mentor who dies, the best friend with great advice, the villain coded in foreign threat. I made a deliberate choice early on: my leads are the ones with the agency. The destiny. The complicated inner life. The arc.

This doesn't mean they're invulnerable or untroubled. That's not strength—that's cardboard. My characters carry weight. They have doubts. They have histories that shape their choices in ways that feel true to the cultures and experiences I'm drawing from.

But they are never, ever waiting to be chosen.

On power dynamics specifically in romance: I think the key is making sure both parties have something to lose and something to offer. A dominant character isn't interesting because they're in charge. They're interesting when their dominance is complicated—when the person they want isn't impressed by it, or sees through it, or has a kind of quiet authority that makes the dominant character reconsider.

Vulnerability as strength. That's the trope I'm chasing.

And in fantasy more broadly, I try to build worlds where strength has multiple shapes—not just physical, not just magical. Wisdom is strength. Emotional intelligence is strength. The character who knows how to read a room or hold a community together or survive what would break someone else—that's power, and I want it to be legible as such in my worldbuilding.

No damsels. No saviors who swoop in without cost. No love interests whose entire function is to reflect the protagonist back at themselves.

Just two people (or three, or found families of complicated, beautiful, broken humans...or beings) who choose each other with eyes open, with full knowledge of what they're walking into, and decide it's worth it anyway.

That's the romance I'm writing. That's the fantasy I want to live in.

Until next time,

Jade